Girls on fire! Feminist group stages series of topless protests across Europe (PHOTOS) – Warning Nudity Inside

One of the reasons people protest is to expose their ideas to the world.

It seems to be working for one group of female activists — at least the exposure part.

The group, Femen is a group of women who, according to the organization’s website, defend sexual and social equality with their breasts and “undermine the foundations of the patriarchal world by their intellect, sex, agility, make disorder, bring neurosis and panic to the men’s world” (sic).

Femen claims to be in 17 countries and have more than 150,000 supporters — the human kind, not brassieres — and has recently gained attention for public protests against Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin, IKEA, and, most recently, the Vatican City, where police wrestled two topless women to the ground during a brief protest after cardinals went into the Sistine Chapel to start their Pope picking.

The group was founded in 2008 in Ukraine by a group of twenty-something women, including Anna Hutsol, Oksana Shachko and Alexandra Shevchenko, in part, to stop the country from becoming a hotbed for sex tourists and human traffickers, Slate.com reported.

Hutsol said the topless protests started because she and the other founding members felt that only “radical things can change the situation” she told Osocio.org.